As Marijn Dekkers, chief executive of Bayer, presents the latest quarterly results of the German life sciences and chemicals group today, he will outline plenty of changes. But there will be one constant: a product that has remained a mainstay of the company for decades.
Aspirin, the painkiller the company launched more than a century ago, was still generating €766m in sales in 2010. That made it one of just a handful of Bayer’s $1bn-plus a year “blockbuster” drugs, led by Betaferon for multiple sclerosis and the birth control pill Yaz, but it is the only one long unprotected by patents.
“It’s hard to imagine Bayer without aspirin, or the other way round,” says Flemming Ornskov, head of strategic marketing at Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals. “It is an integral part of our history. I wish I could say the company set out 100 years ago to have this as a sustainable success.”